


Four Ways To Make Brown Eyes

by doomedship



Category: Sanditon (TV 2019)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-09
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2021-01-26 09:10:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21371692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doomedship/pseuds/doomedship
Summary: The world played out in four combinations.
Relationships: Charlotte Heywood/Sidney Parker, Clara Brereton/Edward Denham, Georgiana Lambe/Arthur Parker
Comments: 11
Kudos: 84





	Four Ways To Make Brown Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> And for my next trick watch me bum everyone out.

1\. _Sidney and Eliza_

She's manipulative, and he's drunk out of his head. 

It's the only way he can get through the farce of this wedding night, and the whole time he's thinking of brown eyes instead of blue. 

He doesn't enjoy a moment of it and when it's over he feels such disgust that he stumbles from the bedchamber and doesn't return. 

She doesn't care and she gets what she wants. She always gets what she wants. 

Nine months and there's the proof of it. 

Eyes are blue at first; he doesn't really think on it, assumes this child of theirs is more than half hers. She always prefers to keep the lion's share and he doesn't fight it. He keeps his distance, doesn't get attached. 

But time brings a deep, velvet brown in place of icy blue. 

And then when he looks in his daughter's eyes it's almost possible to believe she's the daughter he should have had. 

It's enough to love her as she should be loved. 

He doesn't get his fairy-tale, never knows what love in marriage is. There are no more babies and that's a relief, because one set of mirrored brown eyes is enough to leave his heart in pieces every time he sees them.

But time moves on and babies grow. So he learns to let his feelings come and go.

He does not love the road he walks but while he walks it he thinks at least he has this brown-eyed girl. 

  
2\. _Georgiana and Arthur_

They're two odd souls out, and it's not love. Not really. 

Georgiana must marry, or the men who swarm like spiders to entrap her in their webs will never leave her alone. They plot and scheme and see nothing but her wealth and she is kept like a bird in a cage because of it.

She wants more than anything to be free. And she sees a value in Arthur that no one else does. 

It's her idea, and he laughs gamely and says "Good one, Miss L!" but the seriousness of her expression ends all that. 

"But, I don't know the first thing about being a husband," he protests. She shrugs, and says she only wants him to give her a little freedom. He tells her he only wants a full and hearty table, and a warm place to call home. 

So it works. She gives her fortune over to a man who barely spares it a second thought and keeps it wisely except on occasion where sustenance is concerned. In return, he springs her from her gilded prison and has her dance and laugh to her heart's content. 

If it's not love it's at least friendship, and in years to come that's enough to turn to bashful intimacy. 

And in yet more years there's a boy and a girl with skin too dark to ever be fashionable, but large brown eyes so bright and full of horizons there's none alive who could call them unhandsome. 

And it's more a happy ending than most people get.

  
3\. _Edward and Clara_

It's a disaster from the get go. 

She knew she was playing with fire when she got herself tangled up in Edward Denham's twisting snare of greed and narcissism, knew what the stakes really were.

But you don't lie down with dogs if you're afraid of a few fleas. 

She's already in London when she realises what's happening. Back with her pauper family living like mice in a hole, and back with a simmering fury in her heart at the injustice of her life.

She was born with victimhood built in.

She waits til her belly starts to swell, then she puts on her best dress and catches the night coach to call on him one morning, arriving unannounced. 

She finds him in a ragged half drunk stupor in a filthy home, which she assumes has been the state of affairs since Esther left. She looks at him with barely restrained disgust, and bats her eyelids as she rests her hand tellingly on her stomach. 

He takes one look at her rounded belly and barks with shrill laughter. 

"How poetic!" he says spitefully, and shuts the door in her face. 

She gives birth in a squalid corner of London, and a few days later she takes only one look at the squinting brown eyes of her child before she bundles him up and leaves him on the doorstep of Sanditon House. 

Clara Brereton never once looks back.

She can't afford to.

  
4\. _Sidney and Charlotte_

They are both broken-hearted and a lot foolish. 

It's the eve of his engagement to Eliza and he finds her bedroom in the dead of night and she's shocked and hurt and lonely and broken. 

She sees the desperation in him, only watches as he steps into her room, reaches for her. Doesn't find a word of protest when he kisses her like a drowning man clinging to life. 

She stops thinking about what's right, what's proper when he pulls her gown from her shoulders and lays her down on the bed. 

He's terrified and she's too much invested. 

She gives him everything for just one night and when it's over they're both crying and clinging to each other in the darkness. 

In the morning he goes to London to return to the lion's den, and she prepares to leave for good.

In three months the beginnings of a swell in her belly begin to form. 

After the initial uproar, the whole family works together to pass the child off as another Heywood baby, and no one bats an eyelid at this all too plausible story, even if the Heywoods are getting a shade too old to be new parents now. Their fertility has obviously never been in question. 

Sidney Parker never sees Charlotte Heywood again, but the day will come when she will see him every day through the serious brown eyes of their little boy.

Their son is an old soul, and he tethers her to life with his warm little hand tight in hers, and slowly, slowly, her heart starts to beat again, so very long after she first watched it break in the bedsheets next to a man she could never have. 

It is all at once enough, and nowhere near.


End file.
